


if you'll have me

by nebula5



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Immortality, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 14:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11210163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebula5/pseuds/nebula5
Summary: Steve Trevor lives.They don't know how. She doesn't ask.





	if you'll have me

  

 

**1918, Belgium**

From below, Diana sees the plane explode. It’s bright and orange and even here, so far away, she thinks she can feel the heat of it on her face.

Steve is gone, blown into a million tiny pieces, blood and grit and ashes tossed by the raging explosion.

She screams and screams, but what is left of him can't hear her now.

 

 

 

**1918, London**

After, soldiers talk wistfully about a woman with a shield, and when Diana walks past them she lowers her head and looks away. She learns to cope. She volunteers with nurses, helps to rebuild homes. She works and works and works so she doesn’t have to rest.

They make her of course, Sammy and Chief and Charlie and Etta. They have their own memories, their own grief for Steve to work through, but they help her anyways.

They can’t help her with dreams though, and the dreams are relentless. When she sleeps she can see him, really see him. His eyes are so blue and he opens his mouth to say something and—

Smoke and orange flame burst behind her eyelids, and she gasps awake in the dark, sheets tangled around her legs.

Other times she dreams of him in the baths on Themyscira, or sleeping in a boat, or putting spectacles on her. One time she dreams of him wrapping her lasso around his wrist, the rope glowing gold against his skin.

Steve says, _we’re probably going to die._

 _No_ , she says, _just you._

Diana wonders if she can bring him back by wishing hard enough.

 

...

 

As it turns out, it seems she can. The news comes a week later.

“Diana, Diana!” It's Sammy. He rushes into the ward she is in, breathless, eyes bright.

“You must come at once!”

She rises, wipes her hands on a towel.

“It’s Steve.”

Her heart beats fast and hard in her chest. “Where?” she asks.

“Across the yard, the second building—”

Diana knows it. She walks out of the room, and then she jogs, and then she sprints.

 

...

 

Steve Trevor is alive.

He look so small and pale in the bed. Cuts and stitches and bandages cover his skin, but he is alive, and Diana almost sinks to her knees right there in the doorway.

“Diana,” he says, and reaches out to her.

She is there in an instant. “You’re alive,” she whispers. She runs her fingertips over his forehead, the curve of his ear, his jaw.

“Barely,” he snorts, and Diana wants to laugh and cry at the ridiculous sound he makes.

He leans into her touch. He’s solid, warm, decidedly real and not a dream.

“I don't understand.”

He shrugs, and the movement must hurt, because he winces and grits his teeth. Diana hovers, not sure where to put her hands, not wanting to hurt him.

“They found me in the dirt a few miles out,” he says, taking her hand again. “I don't know how I… I don't remember much.”

“I thought you—” Diana doesn't dare say the word, scared that if she does he might vanish again, somewhere far and out of her reach. She changes the subject. “I defeated him, Ares.”

“I know,” he says. “Heard all about it. Knew you could save the world.”

“He was my half brother. Our father was Zeus.”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up on his forehead. “Well,” he says. “That's. Pretty crazy.”

“You don't believe me.”

“Oh, I do, angel,” he shakes his head, smiles up at her again. “I do.”

 

 

 

**1919, Brighton**

When he heals, except for a faint limp in his left leg, he takes her down to Brighton.

They stroll across the beach and down the pier and he buys her strawberry ice cream, chocolate for himself. When he gets some on his nose she laughs and swipes at it with her thumb.

Steve can't stop smiling. Its an exhilarating feeling: cheating death, falling in love with a goddess, making her giggle like a schoolgirl.

Halfway down the pier she strides forward to catch his hand, just like she did on their first day in London.

She grins down at their linked fingers. “Because we’re together, ‘that way,’ correct?”

“Yes ma'am,” he says, mock serious. “You are correct.”

“Good,” she says, pleased, and then she turns back to her ice cream.

Later, she'll get some on the side of her mouth, and Steve will lean forward to kiss it clean.

 

 

 

**1932, London**

She finds him in front of the mirror in the bathroom one night: shirt off, examining the scars raised on his arms and chest.

“Steve?”

“Oh, I was just…” he doesn't finish, moves to trail his fingers across the stubble of his jaw instead.

She steps behind him to curl her arms around his waist and prop her chin on his shoulder. Like this, no shoes on, they are nearly the same height.

“How old am I, Diana?”

“Forty-nine.”

He meets her eyes in the mirror. “Do I look like it?”

Diana knows what he is seeing. His hair is not yet streaked with gray, though it should start to be by now. His body is lean and strong as ever, his eyes unclouded. He doesn’t look a day over thirty-five, and she’s noticed for a while.

“This is… I don't know,” he turns in her arms to drop his head to her shoulder. “Who am I now, Diana? What... what am I?”

She strokes his hair and holds him tightly against her. Like this she can feel the way he trembles, uncertain and afraid.

“There must be some magic left in this world,” she says. “Something that saved you that night. But you are still Steve Trevor.”

She lowers her voice, speaking softly in his ear. “You are a man. Kind and noble. Brave, determined.” She presses a kiss to his temple. “Above average.”

He relaxes in her arms, sighs into her hair.

“Ok,” he says, and she leads him back to bed.

 

...

 

She brushes his hair away from his face as he sleeps. She doesn’t know if this is immortality. She doesn’t know how it could be possible. Strange things are at work here, and only time will tell.

But if it is, oh, if it is…

 _It won’t be so bad,_ she wants to tell him.

Gods damn her for being selfish, but she had wanted so fiercely for him to live. Now, she wants him by her side.

_I’ll be with you, if you’ll have me._

 

 

 

**1939, London**

The news of another war makes her shake with anger. She thinks back two decades, to so much death and destruction, and for what?

Her mother’s words, from so long ago it seems, ring loud in her ears again. _They do not deserve you, Diana._

Steve takes her hands in his, draws his thumbs over her knuckles. She can see the weariness in his eyes too, knows he is remembering the horrors of the war from before.

“We must help.” It is so simple to say. _Please,_ she pleads to the heavens, _not again._

“I know,” he says, raising a hand to cup her cheek. “I know.”

 

 

 

**1952, Themyscira**

Hippolyta knows her daughter will return to her one day. She can feel it, deep within her.

One morning she wakes with a warmth in her chest, and she rides down to the docks to meet Diana when she arrives.

 

...

 

From above she watches Steve Trevor try and fail to keep up with her warriors. Someone helps him up off the grass after he falls, and he turns to wave at Diana from the field.

“You are happy?” she asks, but she knows the answer to this already. She can tell from the way Diana smiles: the joy so clear on her face.

“I am, mother.”

 

...

 

She catches Steve alone one afternoon, when Diana is away on another part of the island.

He ducks his head and lowers his eyes. “Your highness.”

She nods. Not quite correct, but sincere nonetheless.

“You must be a good man, that whatever powers that still exist have kept you at my daughter’s side.”

He shuffles. “I try my best.”

It’s bittersweet, that her only child should be tethered now to the world of men, drawn away all those years ago by the man standing before her. But Diana is different now: stronger, smarter, mature. She has witnessed so much death, two wars too many, the darkness at the hearts of mankind. Yet still she is so loving, so kind. It is apparent in the way her desire for good and justice remains undimmed. Hippolyta is grateful for this.

“Cherish her,” is all that she can ask.

“I will,” he says, and she knows that he means it.

 

 

 

**1982, Greece**

They lie next to each other across the bed, arms dangling off the edge.

England had been home for so long. They only left after Etta, the last of their friends, had passed. Now Greece, because it reminded Diana of the home she had grown up on. But it’s no substitute for paradise, and Steve knows she’s itching to see more of the world.

“How about America?” she asks. “Your hometown?”

He shakes his head. They had visited his parents in 1923, and a few more times after that, but there's no one left for him there anymore. “Somewhere else, a different city,” he says, spreading open an atlas on the floor.

Diana hums, waving her fingers over a map of the good ol’ US of A.

“You close your eyes too,” she says, nudging him with her shoulder. He obeys. “Tell me when to stop.”

He waits a second, and then another. “Now.”

“New York,” Diana declares.

“New York it is,” Steve says. He would follow her to the ends of the earth, if she had asked him to.

 

 

 

**1999, New York**

Steve yawns when he enters the kitchen. Diana is already awake, still in her pajamas, hair loose and tumbling around her shoulders. In an hour she will have it brushed back, sleek and tight at the nape of her neck. She's beautiful then too, of course, but Steve likes her this way the best, when she’s relaxed in a way that only he’s allowed to see.

“Morning,” she says to him, looking up from her paper.

“G’morning.” He bends down to kiss her and she meets him halfway, tilting her face up.

Breakfast is already set out for him. Even after all these years, he can’t quite get the hang of waking up at the crack of dawn like she can. He chalks it up to her having a few thousand years more experience.

He’s got half a slice of toast in his mouth when he feels her eyes on him.

“What?” he asks, around a mouthful of bread.

She smiles, and with the morning sun haloing her like this she looks radiant: every inch a goddess, an angel. He swallows dumbly, wonders just how the universe decided he was worthy enough to be sitting across from Diana of Themyscira in a nightgown at 7:45 in the morning in an apartment in New York.

“Newspapers and breakfast,” she says.

“Guess we've got the hang of it.” He wants this, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in a month, a year, forever.

“Yes,” she says, her smile growing. “I think we do.”

 

 

 

**2014, Paris**

Bruce Wayne meets Diana Prince for the first time at a gala at the Louvre.

She’s easy to pick out from the crowd: tall and elegant, dressed in gold. A man hands her a flute of champagne and moves to stand at her elbow.

“Diana Prince,” she says, after he introduces himself. “Antiquities.”

“And Mr?”

“I'm Steve. Steve Trevor.” The man’s smile comes easy, charming. “I’m her secretary.”

“Secretary, huh?”

“Oh yes, he’s very good.” There’s a twinkle in her eye, and from beside her, Steve chuckles. A private joke then.

Later, he sees her lean and whisper something into Steve's ear, too close to not be intimate. He laughs in response, and Bruce doesn’t miss the way the man rests his hand comfortably at the small of her back.

 _Secretary, my ass,_ he thinks.

 

 

 

**2016, Metropolis**

Diana stumbles into a hotel room at dawn, and peels her armour away to examine the cuts and bruises that are already starting to heal.

“Hey,” Steve answers when she calls. “How are you doing? Saw what happened.”

She lets her eyes slide shut at the sound of his voice.

“I’m ok.”

“Ok. That’s good. When are you coming home?”

There will be a funeral for Clark Kent, she thinks. She should be there.

“Next Thursday.”

“Let me take care of the ticket. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“Thank you," she says. "Love you."

She thinks of Lois Lane, the way she had looked up at her in grief. It reminded her of herself. What she had felt, once. Almost.

She is lucky, so lucky, compared to most people.

 

 

 

...

 

 

 

**1918, Belgium**

There isn’t enough time. He wishes desperately for more.

“I love you,” he says, stepping backwards and away.

He isn’t even sure if she heard him.

 

 

 

**2018, Paris**

All the time in the world now, but he tells her often, just because he can.

“I love you,” he says, a hundred years later.

She hears him.

“I love you too,” she replies, sleepy.

She slips her hand over his hip to tug him closer in the dark, and he closes his eyes and lets her.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> My kink is love interests not dying.


End file.
